When young, rivers are restless creatures. They rise and swell, carving a path into the mountains and plains. They form interlacing channels and long plait-like strands. They tear into the earth, dredging up boulders and sediment, carving their way through bedrock and piling sand into small islands. These young rivers lay down a varying pattern of channels described as anastomosis: narrow looping passages pulling apart like an unraveling braid only to weave back together again. Eventually, these branching bodies calm themselves to reconnect and form the wide, slow meander of a mature waterway.

Anastomosis is a term describing a multitude of branching systems, not just rivers, familiar to us in a variety of things - blood vessels, the veins of a leaf, ridges along the tops of mountain ranges, and patterns in sand dunes. The configuration is a fractal. It is the golden ratio, a golden mean, an aesthetic and mathematical formula that forms the basis of perceived beauty, symmetry, and space. But it is a structural schematic, as well. These systems are often the basis of a larger network that serves the purpose of connectivity, whether seemingly related or not. In the case of rivers, leaves, and veins, these systems bring sustenance to far reaches. In the case of man-made roads, bridges, and tunnels, they bring people.

In Claire Johnson’s exhibition of the same name, a•nas•to•mo•sis features a new series of mountainous and aerial landscape paintings exploring contour, pattern, and color formed either by nature or human intervention across the earth's surface. The connection to this investigation of a geographical term is tied to these landscapes in similarities between the branching systems of blood vessels, roads, and river-pathways; linking distant parts or places aren't obviously connected at first glance. These landscapes are an elegant description of anastomosis. But their narratives describe a particular vignette, a specific moment captured in paint the way Johnson remembers feeling at the time.

Hood is likely the most familiar of Johnson’s imagery. Mount Hood is the largest among a scattering of cinder cones and craters along the Oregon range, which include the Three Sisters and Mount Washington to the south. The Pacific Northwest may not be home to the highest elevations above sea level, but these solitary mountains are among the most dramatic in the world. Their towering summits leap high above surrounding peaks and valleys, rising sharply and suddenly. The light bounces off their glaciers and snow packs during the day, and pours itself between long shadows in the valleys at sunset. Hood captures just this moment, when the light briefly reflects a spectrum of purple, pink, and blue hues. The mountain feels like a confection, something sugary and delectable; but the branching ridges of snow and steam rising up from its flanks remind us that this is a magnificent and potentially destructive force far greater than ourselves.

On the opposite end of familiar terrain, Anastomosis (Nevada) is a weird indescribable landform, and unexpectedly my favorite. This bright warm-toned work depicts the most desolate and remote subject of all Johnson’s paintings. It feels more alien than the rich, forested mountains and rippled green landscape of the high plains; yet the connection is evident in its cascading slough, rivulets, and dried vestiges of latticed watercourses. It is a mystery because it is a foreign, hostile, and strange climate. The dangers of a desert are much different but no less deadly than that of a mountain. Anastomosis (Nevada) is lonely, arid, and far from home. Its beauty as an exotically strange place is compelling precisely because of its mystery - is it a dried up lake basin, a salt flat, an ancient sea?

Johnson admits her paintings come from a desire to record, document, and redefine. She describes them romantically, confessing that they are about feeling while pointing out that a formal conversation about feeling becomes awkward; as though somehow, when painters become sentimental, their emotion potentially dimineshes the importance of the work. But in this case, the feeling she describes is on such a grand scale of the Sublime that you can’t help but allow it. A world from 35,000 feet in the air is indescribably humbling, and wondrous. In the same way that 18th Century British philosophers acknowledged the very feeling of beauty as accompanied by a sense of awe, terror, and smallness of mankind; Johnson paints this sense of awe in a way that allows us to experience it ourselves.

True to Johnson’s lifetime of work, a•nas•to•mo•sis is a culmination of color, form, truth, and fiction; painted from memory as much as from observation. None are the same place on canvas as they are in the world. These remote locations are filtered through the lens of personal experience, stories, and a moment she is trying to capture, sharing the sense of awe we feel when enthralled by the beauty and sublimity of an endless horizon.

If you ask most artists about showing their work in a corporate environment, you'll likely be met with a mixture of confusion and horror. Be patient. The artist is attempting to process your question and provide an answer that isn't altogether rude or insulting. The implication of “office art” is that the work isn't high calibre enough to show in a gallery, or be taken seriously as “real” art. Most people outside office culture imagine it to be a place where people sit in pre-fabricated boxes, whittling away the hours for someone else. Dead fluorescent tube lighting casts a green pallor on all it touches. Everything is bland, from the coffee to the carpet. Is this a dire scene? It should be. We who are artists are told an office is the death of art, where paintings go to die. How funny that Seattle artist Graham Downing puts his paintings in offices to give them life. He quietly speaks to the process of painting, confessing his uncertainty about their value or success as paintings. He isn't known for being a painter – he's known for improvisational performance. He also collaborates with Seattle artist Max Kraushaar for sculpture, photography, and performance-based work. Downing has kept these paintings to himself, keeping them hidden away in his apartment, waiting for the right time to reveal them. Placing the work in these seemingly fallow spaces allows him to explore it in a new way. He's testing the waters, stripping away the pressure of revealing them more formally. In a sense, he is creating a two-fold distance between himself and these objects, both through the lens of the camera and by putting them in these awkward, badly-lit corners; disassociating them from the slick presentation a gallery offers. This series demonstrates an ease of composition, revealing analogous geometry: rooms are divided, breaking the frame into thirds; streaks of paint match the fronds of a plant; the lines in the painting are angled the same as the counter on which the painting sits; the color of the subject matches the ambient tone in a distant room. When viewed from across the gallery, the photographs have an odd effect of looking like a mirror. The moment of confusion is delightful – where am I? Oh, that is an office. Wait, there is a painting. This is not that room. That room is a photograph. Each photograph is presented in a sentimentally cheap gilded frame with printed filigree, and accompanied by an overhanging lamp which shines light on the piece. The light in the lamp is a ghastly-toned LED, reflecting the cold light of office fluorescents. The gallery is dark, not only because the lights have been removed but because Downing has placed an installation of banal office-type ceiling tile in the gallery’s renowned skylight, blocking this specifically characteristic element to cast the space in darkness. This is a playful device; trickery. The art in this room will not be glorified by its infamous cataract of bright light. The full spectrum would warm the work, diluting the harsh edge the overhanging lamps provide. This would be the opposite of the work's intention. It is lit this way because we are meant to come closer, and inspect the work more intimately. In this darkness, dramatically accented by discreet lamps, the tone of the room is somber and funerary. The tones of our voices are hushed and reverent. We have come here to pay our respects to the uncertainty of painting.

For a long while, you may find you're trying to place yourself amidst an unfamiliar network of configurations. Are they islands? Are they structures? If there were a marker to indicate “you are here”, where would you be?In her solo exhibition at Length Width Height, Ford presents a cohesive but varied body of work. Her series of folded paper sculptures represent a gradient, which float against the wall in a kind of delicate bas-relief. Sharp edges, creased points, inked and fractured facets play with the idea of how a single value can carry multiple values within it; each of them adding to a sum total of color averaging on a scale of white to black.Her acrylic sculptures recall a larger project for which she created an entire window-sized structural map resembling that of a city, aptly titled “PlastiCity”. With these smaller versions, Ford continues to explore the vertical form of skyscrapers and city skylines on their sides – projecting like sideways stalagmites and stalactites; their cantilevered spires reaching out towards you. They mimic the growth that man-made structures in turn mimic in nature.Ford's centerpiece is a site-specific installation along three walls under the gallery's skylight. Built-up layers of ink, line and shape build an environmental topography to engulf the viewer in a fictional landscape that is at once reminiscent of a bird's-eye view of islands, but also of sounding or elevation maps. The “islands” are constructed of folded paper which jut out from the wall like the fins of an airplane; sharp, angular, and aerodynamic.If Cristin Ford's topographies do not necessarily seek to define or describe; it is what they redact or omit in an eloquent summary of edited information that draws you in. They incorporate texture, quantity, and form. They are a compositional study of value scale via prismatic shapes. Their documentation is less about location, and more about signifier. This is a simulation. This is the edge.

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself”“We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars;organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering theevolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least,consciousness arose.”― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Seattle artist Julia Hensley has been quietly toiling in her studio, chipping away at the edges of the visible universe. She’s conjuring up pixelated fragments of an event horizon, colorful bursts of gas clouds, scattered bits of dark matter against fields of light, and bursting nebulae in negative. Her work translates the utterly foreign landscape of outer space into a specificvisual language. Its expansiveness and unfathomable scale spans light years of distance impossible to absorb; but her blocky interruptions nestled against splattered paint taps into our cultural immersion in technology and digital composition of the world we know, framing it more comprehensibly. Hensley’s paintings could easily be a portrait of blown up and blown out Hubble telescope imagery.

We earthbound creatures are compelled to witness and document the things we can’t explain, faithfully recording what we’ve observed in a multitude of narratives – stories, mythology, songs, art, and science. Each of these is a system of classification in their time. We categorize everything, because humans want to make sense of the world and what lies beyond. But why? Do we wish to control it, or contain it? We obsessively compute algorithms with complicated software to track patterns of objects in space and maps of our relative location to those objects. We take note, and make marks. We count, we research, we compare, we contrast. Our space-bound cameras travel to the furthest reaches of the galaxy where we cannot go. We tirelessly observe, and wait. We are the watchers.

Hensley isn’t necessarily striving for a literal explanation of these ideas, but she does provide some formal aesthetic solutions based on the idea of observation, documentation, adhesion, construction, destruction, and repair. If the elements that cause the effect of creation to take place have any strength in metaphor, it’s here amidst disparate pieces of materials clumped together to form objects. Figures rotate around one another in space, attract and/or repel other objects. They blossom, bloom, and glow; colors spilling out across the visible universe like so much spilled ink. If a gaseous dusty cloud is the birthplace of stars, then Hensley’s gaseous forms are in turn generating a powerful group of paintings about them.

When looking at Hensley’s work, you have this idea of a grid and structure; that formally there is a lot of theory in these compositions. The interplay of abstraction versus representation that manifests as a digital conversation both breaks down and takes shape. Hensley very plainly (well, spectacularly) and unapologetically demonstrates that abstraction is firmly placed in observation. Here, this is what I am looking at. She is pointing to herself, pointing outside of herself. She’s creating tension with figurative shapes that stand in opposition to one another or stand poised in suspense of collision with each other.The color splashes, but somehow manages to not distract the viewer with unintentional associations. Patches of paintedpaper, metallic bits, and colored tagboard are integrated well into the work purposefully, without floating over the top of it as some collage falls in danger of doing. The white of the paper or canvas is as much a strategic use of color as the darkest value, emphasized by painterly strokes, bleeds, and blooms of ink. It’s clear this work is deliberately composed, constructing itself as it grows, moving along and putting itself together in the same way a musical composition is born - note by note.

Perhaps the work feels like music precisely because Hensley is also a musician. Alongside this series, she composed a limited edition set of Star Songs, a group of ambient works that mix an array of textures and sounds, rhythms, and lonely guitaraccents. They linger in the air, gentle percussive notes against a crunchy drone. It’s not the same as listening to the theremin-like howling of Saturn’s rings, or Voyager’s recording of interstellar space. These are melodies we can understand better, but which still incorporate some of the more romantic, dark murkiness we would expect to find out in the deep. These songs create a compulsive desire to sit in a dark room and dream of our origins.

We are here, observing the stars from our earthbound vantage, viewing the limitlessness of the sky. Hensley lifts us up for just amoment to hover amidst the heavens. We bask in its light. Like Sagan, she takes us not only outside of ourselves but outside allwe know of the planet where our feet are rooted to the ground. She sets us back down gently. We can't really be anywhere but where we are, but we know there is more than just this little blue dot. We remember to never stop looking up, to look beyond what we see with our eyes.

This solo show is Salt Lake City artist Kyle Jorgensen's Seattle debut, featuring geometrically patterned drawings and paintings which resemble video game environments, graphic data charts, and surreal representations of nature and topography. Kyle’s palette is chromatic, candy colored, and glittery. He combines abstraction with familiar objects in familiar space, but the deliberate boundaries and borders of its location create new terrain. When not depicting graphic icebergs and forests, it suggests a breakdown and crossover of digital and visual information - corrupted files mixed with organic elements. His landscapes are fictitious realms in a time that might not be our own, but eerily close, as the memory of a dream.

In narrative works which take place outside of time, science fiction futures safely allow for humans to view themselves in rather vulnerable positions without suffering harm to their ego or person. It’s a genre which creates a window into what could be possible but doesn't currently exist, generating new multiverses around the one we know. Jorgensen recreates his new worlds to be corrupted, imperfect, layered, and trans-dimensional; building over the top of the one he knows.For this reason, Kyle Jorgensen's aesthetic immediately resonates with video game and science fiction enthusiasts - thematically instilled with images of galaxies, smoke, icebergs, broken planes, and pixelated landscapes. This is a mirror universe to our own. This is where we are, but it’s also where we’re not.

In one particular painting, "Effigy For the Digital Age", there are echoes of a specific visual language about the fabrication of a video game world. We ordinarily take this visual language for granted as we play, but actively participate in games such as Minecraft, which glorifies a retroactively blocky universe (a shout out to ancient 8 bit color graphics). Minecraft is a self-constructed world with incredible versatility. The player’s actions have a direct impact as they build up or tear down the world around them. Each choice is a different outcome. Each choice potentially leads to reward, or destruction. But throughout, the knowledge remains that even in death, one can begin again.

Effigy is directly related to this implication, striking a chord with our desire to burn down, restart, respawn in an entropic world. What's done can't be undone - unless you're in a video game. In that case you can die, abort, pause, and resume over and over until you get it right. In this way, our new worlds become revisions and reinventions of old ones. The difference is, in life if you make a mistake you suffer the consequences without reversal. In video games, you can redeem yourself.

Though we’re not in a video game, we each construct our lives to some extent. Social media allows us to precisely select what our world looks like to others, despite the actual game play. We build, delete, rearrange, block, rebuild; repeat. These pixels have been moved over here. Those pixels over there. Other pixels are halved or removed entirely. In the days of film prints, we might have torn or burned unwanted reminders of a past we didn't want in order to remove it. But this kind of therapy currently has no digital equivalent. Not quite.

Jorgensen addresses the idea of a digital effigy, a ritual that can only take place where pixels are present. This kind of effigy, to burn down everything we know, becomes a kind of reprogramming at the code level. We re-write history by rewriting ones and zeros, killing it at the source.. An exterior illusion of change while protecting an interior state that is still evolving through that change. His paintings are that change - morphing states at the compositional level. A breakdown of old information. Rebooting new information. Personal climates. Lone icebergs traveling through space. Elemental shifts in volume and substance. Moving bodies in space. Dopplar shift. Counting down.

In 2005, just back from New York, I was meandering through the TK Building in Pioneer Square - a building in Seattle’s historic gallery district which houses a few dozen galleries and artist studios on the ground floor, and artist live/work spaces above. I remember the excitement I felt as I discovered strong contemporary work in galleries like Punch, 4Culture, G. Gibson, and SOIL. Next to SOIL was a particularly eye-catching gallery called Platform Gallery (all of these galleries still occupy their spaces today), which was curated by four artists: Stephon Lyons, Carol Bolt, Blake Haygood, and Dirk Park. Today, the gallery is run solely by Stephon Lyons, whose elegant and thoughtful aesthetic prevails.

It was this same year that Jennifer McNeely’s solo exhibition at Platform stopped me in my tracks. The gallery was completely overgrown with bulbous, fruit-like sexual forms made of cloth, nylons, coupled bra cups, and fur lewdly poking out of various folds. Chains of seaweed-like clustered nodules hung from the the wall to trail across the floor. It was all I could do to not touch them, rub my cheek against the rabbit fur, or burst into tears because some odd-shaped emotion that had to do with my odd-shaped parts had finally come to light. If Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse are the embodiment of all that is wordless given form, then McNeely is surely their successor in this wordless language. McNeely's legacy of Sisyphean ritualistic preverbal art-making seems to include a compulsion to repair. This renovation is arbitrary – the materials don’t seem to originate as ripped, torn, or otherwise ruined objects; it is the superfluous mending of these objects which requires no fortification other than one the artist desires. The artist is both weakening and strengthening a material that previous to the process was whole and undamaged. The process itself creates something new out of the formerly undamaged/damaged/mended object.

Is it pointless to restore materials which for all intents and purposes are perfectly fine to begin with? How does this process relate to the endless toil of “women’s work”; the specific acts of homemaking, needlecraft, maintenance, and caretaking (a man will work from dusk to dawn, but a woman's work is never done)? McNeely admits that her work is precisely, continually, about refurbishment and the old made new again. She also happens to work with traditionally feminine materials: cloth, upholstery, medical dressings, personal beauty-related objects, thread, and yarn. Historically, women’s roles are behind the scenes; hidden away in hearth and home, schools, hospitals, or farms; submerging themselves in the mechanical workings of the task at hand. Women were generally expected to toil without credit or reward, while men gauged their identity by such recognition, and were applauded for it. Yet McNeely’s work embodies all of these tropes and contradictions, whether masculine or feminine-identified, or through opposing materials. She toils relentlessly to drive her vision so that you will recognize the fruit of her labor and know her; and so she may heal.

It occurs to me that as I’ve struggled to write this essay, the wall I’ve hit has to do with my own history of arbitrary repair. Just prior to my return to art school, I lived through an event that inexplicably changed my inner and outer landscape. It was the catalyst that has shaped every choice I make now. In school, my work was made of delicate plaster shells sewn together in the shape of human bones and soaked in salt, piles of clumpy salt-crusted twine coiled on the floor beneath. This is where the repair began, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I sewed more bones together and connected them, soaking them in a heavy slurry of salt until the entire thing was crusted over, encased in the hardened brine. My mind and body does what it can with trauma but it’s a flawed device and a warped lens. Submerged in memory, I am in a constant state of repair.

Into the Deep implies another kind of submersion, though mimetically different than memory. Far below the surface of the earth’s oceans, at nearly unmarked depths, creatures exist in complete darkness. The pressure is so intense that you must have evolved to endure it. There is no light, taste, smell, and barely any sound. There is only feeling. Creatures are all cilium, flagellum, proboscis, and mouth. They live to survive; against the current, against all odds. McNeely willingly exposes herself to this harsh climate to feel her way in the dark. In lieu of her body, she has created preverbal representatives to go forth and explore the depths in her stead. She outfits her flora and fauna with the parts they need to survive the viscous stew. They are curled, tubed, nippled, tentacled, fringed, and bulbous. Some are meant to float atop the surface – their mammillary protrusions are either subconscious manifestations of Artemis, or they are the bodies, bladders, blades, and clusters of abundantly fruited seaweed. These proxies travel where she cannot go. They feel what she can’t. They give her release.For us, these creatures and forms provide a mirror to examine the shape of our own inner oceanic dwellers. If there is a crack through which we can feel wonder, delight, joy, sadness, love, labor, or yes even beauty; McNeely has broken it wide open. We are rewarded with not just feeling, but vision - out of the deep, and in the light of day.

The Obsessive Unknown Origin of Grotesque Irregularity is inspired by the aesthetics of Rococo, Surrealism, and the Baroque. Each of the presenting artists in have roots in obsessive processes,storytelling, and adornment. The presentation of these works together creates an environment that is not only immediately magical, but which also carries an undercurrent of fascinating narrative in obsession, dreams, the subconscious, folklore and literature. Lush and abundant, their work pushes the boundaries of clutter, beauty, and complicated aesthetics in contemporary work.

I was very excited to welcome two New York artists, Ken Weaver (courtesy of Schroeder Romero & Shredder) and Nancy Baker, to show in this exhibition. I wanted to draw a thread of continuity between the work in Seattle to the work in other cities, demonstrating that we aren't so far removed from trends and movements in the art world at large. Nancy Baker’s tediously accumulated layers create a kaleidoscope of imagery, piling up to the point of overwhelming us entirely. Ken Weaver’s characters are in the midst of some intricate Gothic drama, its mysterious story unfolding in the deepest part of our imagination.

Etymology of the word "baroque" comes from the French word used to describe a style of architecture, and to refer to something irregular and grotesque; as from Middle French in reference to the surface of a pearl; from the Portuguese "barroco" - a pearl of irregular shape, of unknown origin. These descriptive terms remind me of Marilyn Minter, the epitome of contemporary Baroque and Rococo - her works are erotic, frightening, sometimes crusted in filth, sexual in their hyperreality of sweat, saliva, and body parts. They defile the sacredness of beauty even as it is being elevated. Imagery of decay, the body, escapism, and Gothic hyperfantasy prevail.

This hyperfantasy offers us a great privilege: to see what lies in front of our tired vision with refreshed sight. It is a luxury we are rarely afforded, caught in the mundanity of our lives. Hyperfantasy creates a contemporary mythology and pantheon of characters in which we may view our ourselves more closely. In Minter’s case, lips, feet, mud, and jewels all take on an otherworldly cast. We imagine what those things must feel like, what the grit from the mud or the caviar does to our senses. It’s ordinary drudgery, but in fantasy it becomes the most spectacular event.

And each of these artists in has created a spectacular event. Whether it is Casey Curran’s clutching, grasping hand amidst sharp gilded leaves and soft feathers; Mandy Greer’s dazzling patterned display across the entire wall, or Katy Stone’s magical realist weeping cherry tree; these works are environmental. They speak to a place and time that isn’t now or here, telling stories that reflect our lives but imagine those lives in magnificent ways.

This is an essay I wrote for the catalogue that accompanies our current show at LxWxH - The City and The City. This exhibition ties together two cities that have historically felt quite separate, in order to build a bridge between communities. These are my thoughts about its meaning to me, and to the future of our continued discourse.

While I was thinking about Portland in order to write this, I became aware of how difficult it is to see our sister to the south. I suppose it begins geographically - both the northern and southern regions of the Pacific Northwest are made of glacially formed hills and valleys, broad mountain ranges, and split by a giant river. The immediate differences are obvious: Portland is surrounded by rolling hills, and Mount Hood is the only peak in sight. A calm, wide river rests at your feet. Bridges, everywhere. Meanwhile Seattle lives at the lip of a giant fjord, resting between two craggy ranges and a dotted line of dormant volcanoes. Both cities are torn up by rainstorms, and sometimes shaken by earthquakes. The violence and drama of the subduction zone is apparent in the wrinkling of our geography, and our recent memory of Mount St. Helens. Giant waves crash against cliffs along the Washington and Oregon coasts. We live at the edge of the world..

But, ideologically, I have this idea Portland is a city that makes Seattleites reminiscent of days past. It makes us feel romantic, wistful, and nostalgic about a town filled with the faces of old brick buildings, 19th century charm, worn off painted ads and fire escapes on buildings, progressive politics, and small independent businesses. We take leisurely walks through the quiet streets of that small city remembering when we thought Seattle was once like this. Perhaps we have become too big. Perhaps we forgot what it meant to be here. Perhaps we can only survive so much boom and bust.

My boom and bust vision is clouded of course, with our collective history of fires, occupation, protest, logging, fishing, a gold rush, aerospace, and dot coms. The roots of my city are so closely linked to the roots of Portland, and yet from those roots have sprung two different trees.

Portland’s Wikipedia page reveals a section on its cultural life, that out of the ashes of a burnt up dot com industry has risen a city teeming with creativity. That life has brought forth innumerable galleries and independent projects, young emerging artists, and creative enterprises. Donuts are made with bacon, you’re allowed to eat and drink at strip clubs, bicycles are the number one transport, and being an artist or musician is as much an inherent part of what it is to be Portland as ... something that I can’t even think of, because I’m a Seattleite, but likely something to do with brewing beer and independent film making.

But what about the art world, and what does this selection of artists at LxWxH Gallery mean to me, an artist and curator living in Seattle? Who do I imagine living in Portland, and what do I expect to bring to this conversation?

Portland’s art world is revealed to me over time in small pieces - artwork by Patrick Kelly in an obsessive drawing show at Vermillion, writing by Amy Bernstein and Jeff Jahn in PORT Blog, a press release in my email from Disjecta, or a road trip with Jim Demetre to meet Jenene Nagy. I envision the artwork of Portland to be somewhat riskier, as though artists have nothing to lose. Portland feels like there are more independent spaces and less institutional ones. Artists have free reign to speak there for the same reason I feel more freedom here - after living in NYC the West Coast is the last bastion of freedom and entrepreneurship. People move away from the East Coast to get out from under the burden of history, to be freed of the restraints of whatever it is that makes the [art world] machinery turn. As young projects of passion and enthusiasm take shape in an artistically young city the projects could be seen as less refined (they aren't); but they are also more honest.

In order to try and stay abreast of these projects, I tend to collect a mental patchwork of notes from every trip to Portland, never quite grasping a tangible map in my head, nor a real sense of who I've seen or what; or where. It’s like trying to hold a ghost. I just can’t ever hold onto it. Ceramics here, large scale installation in a window there, ah yes - PDX Contemporary and Nationale! But in the last year or so I have begun to focus, and build that map and memory of names and artwork so that I can have something to hold that’s real. So that while I stand in this city, I can still see that one.

Amidst that patchwork, I came across artist Daniel Glendening’s website and discovered a kindred spirit in abstraction, salt, and literature. I made a mental note to try and reach him, to see if he would be interested in working together. Not without some bizarre serendipity, Glendening contacted me in February 2013 to tell me he liked the project and that perhaps we could work together some time to connect our two cities. Without hesitation, I asked what he was doing in May and now we are here.

Our collection of artists in The City and The City isn’t meant to represent a specific aesthetic that is Portland. Nor is this meant to present a full survey of Portland. Rather, this selection represents a small cross-section of what may be found in Portland right now, by artists who are working across varying media - performance, video, installation, drawing, photography, and painting. These are artists Glendening is tracking, among many others, and artists whom we have selected together. The result of any curation is inevitably a thread which can’t help but emerge by virtue of the curators’ line of sight. It is a thread in which we see overlap between artists in their vision, processes, aesthetics, and thought. In this exhibition there is a continuity of perspective - artists who share a city and who are therefore subject to its cultural and geographical influence.

It’s a wonderful thing as I sit in the gallery, quietly preparing for the upcoming show, that I get a quick meeting with Seattle’s Todd Jannausch, an artist and curator known for his unconventional street exhibitions such as Gallery 40 and Gallery 206. Jannausch is getting ready to take his latest project, Small Voids, down to Portland and Oakland at the end of the first week in May. We’ve just agreed to present the grand finale for Small Voids on the street outside of LxWxH on the very same night of the opening that you've just attended. It’s a brilliant end to an epic project.

But what excites me is the serendipitous timing of Todd’s project to ours; that he is bringing a venue for Seattle artists into other cities. He’s creating opportunities where before, none existed. It will overlap and dovetail with The City and The City in the most perfect way imaginable - once, these were two separate conversations about a similar thing that couldn't meet. Now they have become a conversation about the same thing and are quite literally meeting. The artists in Portland who will be showing in Seattle will have a chance to see Seattle artists on the street of their own town. Seattle will be able to see what I hope is the beginning of a venue for more Portland artists in Seattle. These two things will meet again in Seattle on the same block at the same time on the very night that you pick up this publication.

As citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma, standing in one city to see the other, perhaps Daniel Glendening and I are building Orciny - the third city in which we seek to reveal and bring the previously suspected but wholly unknown into the known world. We shift our perspective to allow the other to come forward. In this way, the two cities move closer together to coexist in a way that doesn’t leave us closed off, but with solid bridges which allow us to return again and again. Perhaps this began the moment Todd Jannausch chose to set Small Voids in Portland. Perhaps that small shift in perspective began a large shift in action; a kind of ripple or domino effect. It is fitting that these ways of joining should coincide. It is fitting that in a region beset with and formed from dynamic, tectonic activity that this shift shakes us from a comfortable sleep to wonder what’s happening.

This is what The City and The City means to me right now, in the moment I am typing.It means it is not necessarily “the” beginning, but “a” beginning alongside many others. This is a conversation that will not end, here. There is more to come.

Let us leave a space for us to stand and see it, and each other, again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to write about the Seattle Erotic Art Festival, and I’ve been coming up short since I went last weekend. The problem is this is a doubly subjective issue - sex and art. My brain wants to separate the art part from the sex part on all these really formal levels of art criticism, and really that’s not possible or true. And I want to acknowledge there is no perfect recipe for either and you can’t really tell anyone what to do but you know the bad stuff when you see it. Here’s the thing: nobody’s going to agree with you. Everyone’s going to agree with you. Some people may or may not agree with you. I’m as potentially wrong as I am right about any of this, whether it be sex or art. Before I start, I’m going to tell you that I was pleased with the number of works that weren't photography. There seemed to be an effort and quality in craft that I've seen missing before. Too much of the work was obviously obvious, but when it wasn't it was really good. I didn't even mind the suspended walls and lighting. And I’m not going to get into performance because that’s not what I went for. So if you want to get turned on, see sexy stuff in a public place and not really think about art or be intellectually challenged; if you really like performance and a great party, an excuse to dress up in something really scandalous, and you want to get all hot and bothered; then the Seattle Erotic Art Festival is just the thing for you. Have a great time - you’re going to love it. I promise. And there’s really nothing wrong with that. SEAF serves a great purpose which I’ll get into later, and that’s a good thing. But this is what I am left thinking about, post coital exposure (and now I am about to ensure that I will never again receive a press pass to the festival): : My attendance was a calculated act, which oddly is the same reason I guest curated in 2009. I wanted to see if art could be art before it was erotic, and thus have more substance. After all, the sexiest art was always the work which was incidentally sensual. I wanted to prove all the people wrong who thought that erotic art meant only one thing, or a limited number of things. I wanted to be wrong in my assumption that the people running the festival felt that way in the first place. But as expected there was just a lot of nakedness and cheap one-liners. That didn't thrill me. It bored me. I can't possibly be alone. You might wonder what the problem is and you're totally right if the only thing sex means to you is naked people and straight up porn. However, if you want actual multi-tiered stimulation that excites you beyond whatever gives you an erection then you're probably going to be disappointed [again]. Perhaps we can agree on these things (can we agree on these things?):Sex is more than a naked person with a hot body. It's more than a naked person with a hot body arranged in an aesthetically pleasing manner with good lighting and/or honey or other questionable wet substance smeared all over it. Sex is more than a vagina presented to the camera with a fist in it. It's more than high-def genitalia, by itself, disembodied as though the person attached to it is nonexistent. Sex is more than just fucking, really, even if you are just submitting to a one night stand. Yes we've all fucked somebody just to fuck them. But what was it about them that got you in the first place, besides a tight ass, big tits, or huge cock? There are a ton of sexy people you've met to whom you've said no. Why is that? Think about it for a minute before you read further.So without completely slamming the Festival, which I want to fully believe does the best it can with what it gets, I have some questions to present followed by a few suggestions: Why would anyone put the bizarre and limiting pressure on themselves to be an “erotic” artist? The work that should be there is work that is art first, sex later. I'm explicitly saying that erotic art is best when it's not set out to be erotic art. Everything else feels like a cheap attempt to elevate pornography. It’s no better than those really bad drawings you and your friend made in the back of your notebook in 6th grade. Artists have one driving force behind all bodies of work: philosophical intent. There’s always a narrative underneath the imagery. It’s almost as if in art, subject matter is circumstantial - no matter how much an artist claims the subject comes first, it’s really a projection of some underlying problem the artist is trying to solve, much in the manner of a scientific query. If there isn't some kind of philosophical intent behind the work, then the work itself becomes an empty shell. This isn't some kind of art theory, it’s just a fact. Has the internet ruined it for everyone?Porn is everywhere - in our magazines, movies, music videos, advertisements, in our fashion, and with our coffee, and I’d argue that most of us are just unimpressed with the abundance of sex we can get for free. Why would we pay? Amateur porn reins supreme. Even the porn industry itself is dying out. Why would anyone pay to see something on the wall that they can view on their screen? And what about Tumblr? Porn Tumblrs are everywhere. I have a Google Reader dedicated entirely to porn Tumblrs. On Tumblr you will find no end to an artful array of beautiful pictures having to do with sex: faux vintage shots with sun flares and hipster glasses, women draped artfully across a blanket on the grass with some kind of nostalgic item from 10/20/30 years ago, white skin on black skin on white skin in an gothy pile of glowing flesh, streams of endless looping gasp and lip-bites in the shape of a GIF. Beautiful erect cocks and bountiful breasts against which none of us can possibly compare in perfection, smoothness, brightness, and Photoshop. Maybe the festival could use Tumblr as the bar to beat. So given the bounty of sex in the world, why is there a festival about it? To raise awareness? To provoke the Right Wing? To make a statement about acceptance? To get people to talk about it? We’re all having it, and we all enjoy sexy images of sexy people.. What makes us want to pay the full admission price to see it on the wall - is it for the sake of seeing it on the wall? Maybe it’s the titillation itself of viewing it in public, and not being able to do anything about it until we get back behind closed doors. Maybe we’re all walking around hoping that suddenly everything’s going to turn into that party in Eyes Wide Shut. It won't, I can assure you. Never mind that, here’s what I really think about why there’s a festival and how it could be better: Americans still live in a repressed culture that shies away from any kind of open social and political advancement or conversation about the diversity and multiplicity of our very individual sexual lives. Because we can’t talk about it, sex is still ridiculously and adolescently humorous, as though we’re getting away with something that our parents won’t like and that makes us want it even more. We still have an alarming rate of ignorance about sexual health and function, and we still don’t seem to know how to keep the relationships we have because we’re so afraid of talking about it. Unfortunately, while I believe that the CSPC wants to increase the education and acceptance of our varied and wilder sexual identities, year after year this festival reminds me we're more and more disconnected from sexuality and more specifically, sensuality in our culture than before, and it isn’t promising to get better.Again I'm just not really clear on the focus of the festival. It isn't entirely their fault - one part of them is heavily entrenched in the world of the Center for Sex Positive Culture while another part of them obviously wants to keep growing beyond it. Another problem is the effort to honour all the past artists who have put them where they are on the map, for fear of alienating their roots. Sadly the Masters of Erotic Art was the most boring wall in the place. SEAF needs to cut the cord. And yet another complication is the effort it takes to navigate through the legion of artwork that is the result of a broad call to art.. That's not even getting into the complicated politics of a multi-staffed jury that is negotiating the work the public gets to see. Maybe this sort of show would be better served as a purely curated exhibition?

One or two people could work together to collect a group of artists they think fit their vision. Perhaps there could be a call for curators, with a proposal for a show. It would be a democratic and diverse process, with a different curator (or curator team) at the helm with either a theme or binding conceptual/aesthetic thread between the artists and the art they choose. There should be a strong curatorial vision and statement, published everywhere, along with a guide that educates viewers about the many different facets of sexuality, explaining some of the imagery in the show (especially the more violent themes found in S&M and bondage), and maybe even a few essays from guest writers or artists. The show could and should be smaller with an emphasis on quality over abundance, and perhaps the performance isn't gone but in an entirely different venue altogether so that people would willingly choose what they’re there for. After all, many festivals are in multiple venues. And it's really hard to look at art when the music is so loud you can't think. It's even harder if the lights are turned down to focus on the performance.I conducted an informal poll on Facebook, asking people what they wanted out of an erotic art festival. People generally agreed that they wanted something “more” than what they found. My post reflects the opinions of people I asked, both kink-community involved, mainstream, and Seattle art world; and it does seem to be a general consensus that while people have been having a great time they’re yearning for something more stimulating - an interesting thought given the event is expressly based on stimulation. Almost everyone agreed that while they enjoyed the party, they wanted to enjoy the art more. If I have any parting words for SEAF, it would be to think hard about the identity and message of the festival. Figure out what it means to talk about sex in a world that’s drenched in it. Allow yourself to open up to ideas that aren’t immediately obvious. And most importantly: make the assumption that your audience is smarter, more intellectual, more experienced, and harder to please than what you have previously thought. You might just be surprised. The 10th anniversary Seattle Erotic Art Festival celebrates “10 Years of Love and Lust”, June 16-24, 2012. More than 10,000 attendees are anticipated for this showcase of visual art, interactive installations, performances, short film, literary art, after-parties, workshops and more, at Fremont Studios.

Last July, Shaun Kardinal created an interactive piece for Seattle's web-based gallery project Violet Strays. It blew my mind. At first glance, it's an image. Then it occurs to you to hover your mouse over it, or perhaps this happens accidentally or intuitively. Things start to spin around, and layer up as you move the arrow. Once you click the image, it reloads to start something new and your dance begins again. The joy of the piece is in your discovery of an invitation to play.

This user-dependent browser-based piece is built from a photo feed which accumulated over the course of his one week "installation". The overlays are geometric and graphic but if you know Kardinal's work, you know these marks are essentially a virtual embroidery stitch on a virtual card. The piece is titled "Heptaparaparshinokh" which upon some research was revealed to be "The Law of Seven (or Octave)" - fascinatingly having to do with seven points of swerving from a previous direction of a force's movement. Heptaparaparshinokh is an elegant marriage of concept and aesthetic.

Kardinal's sewing came at a time when there wasn't much sewing going on in Seattle, but it was beginning to creep into view. Unlike large scale projects such as my own where the stitch is large and spans a 13 foot wall; this vein of work brings art down to an intimate level where the work is cherished and hand-held. Artists love postcards. They trade them, they add to them, they become elaborate exquisite corpse projects. But Shaun keeps it quiet, simple, and contained. They are created from his own world but he is offering them to you without pretense or expectation. They are what you want them to be.

I appreciate that Kardinal's stitching has become more integrated with the collaged image, that there is a visual storyline of colour, shape, and form that springs from the composition underneath. The fault of many artists who embroider is that the stitch has little or nothing to do with its source, serving more as an arbitrary treatement of line and colour for the sake of design. That isn't necessarily bad, but it's the particular virtue of Connotations that the hand of the artist aligns itself with the material so well. This integration is what makes it so strong and in my opinion, though it manifests in Connotations it truly culminates in his web project Heptaparaparshinokh. This is an experiment that I look forward to seeing continue both in tactile paper pieces and hopefully, some day on a screen once again.